Top 120 Joan D. Chittister Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn’t true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.”

— Joan D. Chittister

52. “Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that’s in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.”

— Joan D. Chittister

53. “Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.”

— Joan D. Chittister

54. “We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.”

— Joan D. Chittister

55. “When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.”

— Joan D. Chittister

56. “Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges.”

— Joan D. Chittister

57. “The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”

— Joan D. Chittister

58. “Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.”

— Joan D. Chittister

59. “An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.”

— Joan D. Chittister

60. “It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are – and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside...”

— Joan D. Chittister

61. “There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying – which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.”

— Joan D. Chittister

62. “The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

63. “Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.”

— Joan D. Chittister

64. “Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.”

— Joan D. Chittister

65. “We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

— Joan D. Chittister

66. “Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.”

— Joan D. Chittister

67. “The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. She writes, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

68. “I learned that the Italians are right. It isn’t what happens to us that counts. It’s what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference.”

— Joan D. Chittister

69. “We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn’t prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It’s what’s inside of us, not what’s outside of us that counts.”

— Joan D. Chittister

70. “Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.”

— Joan D. Chittister

71. “If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.”

— Joan D. Chittister

72. “It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.”

— Joan D. Chittister

73. “Statio – stopping to collect our hearts and minds before we begin something new – is the sign that we know we are about to do the will of God for the world. We know that we must not go at it when we are scattered of heart.”

— Joan D. Chittister

74. “Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

75. “My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.”

— Joan D. Chittister

76. “Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

77. “Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair.”

— Joan D. Chittister

78. “Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.”

— Joan D. Chittister

79. “We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.”

— Joan D. Chittister

80. “Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.”

— Joan D. Chittister

81. “We don’t change as we get older – we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.”

— Joan D. Chittister

82. “Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

83. “In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.”

— Joan D. Chittister

84. “We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything. We confuse “stagnant” with “calm” and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

85. “We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.”

— Joan D. Chittister

86. “A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility – and the morality – of the church itself.”

— Joan D. Chittister

87. “To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not “coming.” Heaven is here.”

— Joan D. Chittister

88. “The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.”

— Joan D. Chittister

89. “Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.”

— Joan D. Chittister

90. “But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us – and are not ours at the same time.”

— Joan D. Chittister

91. “All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.”

— Joan D. Chittister

92. “Persistence may not solve everything – at least in our lifetime – but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.”

— Joan D. Chittister

93. “No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don’t get it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

94. “Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.”

— Joan D. Chittister

95. “Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.”

— Joan D. Chittister

96. “We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

— Joan D. Chittister

97. “Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?”

— Joan D. Chittister

98. “As Albert Camus put it: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

— Joan D. Chittister

99. “We should employ our passions in the service of life,” Sir Richard Steele wrote, “not spend life in the service of our passions.”

— Joan D. Chittister

100. “Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.”

— Joan D. Chittister